Heyo,

I'm checking things out after a bit of a hiatus. I really want to dust my Bard off again but 3.0 broke Song of the Siren which was my favorite enchante by far. Has this been added back in? Any word on it's status?

Thanks!

I don't know why people are so keen on this spell/ability - while some hunting grounds certainly don't spawn 4 critters per hunter, most do.

>> I don't know why people are so keen on this spell/ability - while some hunting grounds certainly don't spawn 4 critters per hunter, most do.

Most don't in my experience. Or if they are spawning 4 its because multiple people are in the areas. And then you have a lot of issues of people are dancing with 4 etc.

>> I can see why. As a PC I used it A LOT. It made me a lot of friends. When I was training stuff that was just slightly below where I needed to be or backtraining, it was really helpful as well.

>> I don't know where it is slated as far as the list, but I'll make sure Raesh and/or Ricinus are aware -- they'd be the two go to guys doing conversion. I just have no idea where its falling on the scale these days.

It was so amazingly helpful! If spawn was a bit slow you could turn it on for a few to get some more creatures. It actually opened up all of Elanthia for me to hunt. A lot places have slower spawn rates or just aren't viable compared to the "good areas", and this spell really helped make everything viable.


It's actually probably one of the most unique abilities in the game. I'm surprised it's not getting more love. Although I bet it's probably some pretty complex code.

> The one problem is figuring out what does the end spell look like - is it cyclic? Do you retain both the quiet and loud options? How do you parse those out?

Ditch the old quiet option. We already have Sanctuary, Balm, warhorns, probably something else I'm forgetting. No need to give us critter control yet again.

And my vote is for non-cyclic.

I would like it to not be a cyclic so that it wouldn't take up the cyclic spot, but theme wise I don't see how this would work as a straight cast spell unless it involved something like playing an instrument or singing or something at the same time.

Unless it did something to the room similar to zephyr where you cast it and it stays in the room, pulsing occasionally with each pulse have a chance to cause something to spawn.

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As someone who used it a LOT...

Why not just turn it back on how it was? Then there doesn't really have to be any new "design" and go through the chain of command. (Hopefully)

I actually really like the cyclic nature. It gave a lot of control and finesse to the whole spell. For example, if the spawn is slow continuously, you can leave it on the whole time, which is pretty powerful. But, you have to be mindful of the facts that you can't have your defensive buff on the whole time if you want the spawn times 100%. Or, you can turn it on for a moment to get some new spawns, then turn it off again and bring up your defensive buffs.

As for "quiet", it's actually pretty useful and is a lot different then sanctuary. Quiet allows you to hunt in harder areas then you might normally be allowed. For example, if I wanted to up hunt red leucros but I knew I could only take 1 of them, I could find a room with 1 red leucro and turn Siren on quiet. this would prevent additional spawning but still allow me to hunt 1 red leucro. Whereas sanctuary would stop all fighting. But then again Albredas balm does a good job of this too, but different mechanically.


I vote for, leave it as is, to at least get it in the game. And revisit when someone has time.

>>Why not just turn it back on how it was?

>>>Because magic 2.1 code doesn't work anymore.

>>>-Raesh

Is the conversion a lot of work if you don't have to make design decisions?

And yet, 2.5 years later we are still working on various Magic related projects.

ASGM Ricinus
Core, Logistics, Survival
Cleric Advocate

>>As for "quiet", it's actually pretty useful and is a lot different then sanctuary. Quiet allows you to hunt in harder areas then you might normally be allowed.

On thinking about this, it would be nice to be able to downtweak the spawn without turning it off completely, which is what Sanc/warhorns do. Balm you can technically still hunt one, but it might be nice to tweak to 2 or 3. Also nice to be able to use it to downtweak without using a cyclic (Balm or Sanc).

> The one problem is figuring out what does the end spell look like - is it cyclic? Do you retain both the quiet and loud options? How do you parse those out?

Could you treat it like a cleric's EF/BF? Give it two nearly identical spells with just slightly different messaging (which you could probably steal from the old spell).

>>Do you regret refactoring for magic 3.0 considering the amount of time it took to do the conversion and then how long it took to clean it up?

No. I do regret that we had some fairly major staff turn over in the middle of it which has made certain aspects... awkward.

>>Alternatively, do you think it would have been more effective to just live with the old system and spend that time crafting new spells/feats under that constraint?

In the end... it likely would have been about the same amount of work.

Really, DR3 grew to be a much larger, intertwined, project then expected and at some point we had to either launch it or not. Since then we've been fixing up what we built.

In the case of magic there's a some things that, for a variety of reasons, never quite worked out the way they were intended or after a few years we're unhappy with the path they led is down. This isn't saying we need Magic 4 (we don't) but we do need to revise certain aspects of it. Thus the barrier changes ongoing in test, the ongoing development of Sorcery and so forth. The tricky right now is balancing work on the core, while also making new stuff.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Lionize/satirize?

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> - Raesh

I love how open and direct you are about all of this. I'll also take this time to throw out a thank you for all the work you guys put into making this game enjoyable for us, the players.

> - RICINUS

Can't wait! Is this the performance updates (which look really fun) or bardic lore?

I too am super excited about the crowd/performance system. And I would also like to thank both of you, Raesh and Ricinus, for the same reason VOLCANUS did. I appreciate the forthright discussion, and obviously all the work. I really don't know how you guys do it.